


154 Acres

by CloudAtlas



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Apologies, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Established Relationship, Light Angst, Multi, Music, POV Clint Barton, Polyamory, Rancher Clint Barton, Relationship Negotiation, Rock Star Bucky Barnes, Rock Star Natasha Romanov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-04 16:55:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: Just because he wants this doesn’t mean he’s not also terrified out of his mind.The completely unintended sequel toMove Dust Through the Light.





	154 Acres

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between the end of the main Move Dust Through the Light story and the album review. Beta'd by **inkvoices**.

**Cerys Matthews on BBC Radio 6 Music**

“Now, earlier I said that I had a special treat for you all and I am _very_ excited to share this, because it really is something special indeed. Earlier this week I received an email from an unexpected source: Natasha Romanov of RedStar, who, as you know, have been on hiatus for almost two and a half years. She said that she and James Barnes, also of RedStar, have been working on something new with a friend who loves this show, downloading it every week via the iPlayer Radio App. Apparently I have a ‘Sunday morning voice,’ which is a truly lovely thing to hear. Anyway, because this mystery friend loves the show they decided to give us the world premiere of their new single. And I have to tell you, listeners, it is absolutely gorgeous – truly beautiful – and I’m so excited to be able to share it with you all. So, for the first time anywhere on the radio, anywhere in the world, here is Helios – Natasha Romanov, James Barnes, and a mystery friend – with 154 Acres. Enjoy.”

 

“Clint?”

Bucky’s voice drifts over the hay bales Clint’s restacking. It wasn’t what he’d planned to do today, but it needs doing, and his delivery of feed and fertilizer has been delayed and isn’t due to turn up until tomorrow now so Clint needs to occupy his time.

“Here!” Clint calls back, shifting another bale into its proper place.

Bucky edges his way around the mess of bales, straw catching on his pyjama pants. Why he’s still in his pyjama pants, Clint has no idea. It’s nearly midday.

“What’s up?” he asks, once Bucky is close enough.

Bucky hesitates and Clint’s anxiety is suddenly howling in his chest. Recently it’s not needed an excuse, even if it’s better than it was. He wipes a hand across his brow nervously.

“Um.” Bucky’s holding something, standing like he’s expecting to get told off but is willing to weather it. “I just… I want you to know that I didn’t go looking or, or anything like that. I was just looking for the banjo you said your Gramps had owned.”

He shifts and something in Clint’s chest shifts with him.

They’re light-years away from the mess they were last summer, but even so Clint’s never needed a reason to worry. It feels like it’s been his default state of being since long before Tasha and Bucky slid into his life. This past year has been something else though, only survivable because he knows that in the end this will be entirely worth it. Tasha and Bucky will always be worth it. Clint’ll take all this anxiety and worry and egg-shell tiptoeing if it means he gets to keep them at the end of it all.

“You – you said it was under the bed, but,” Bucky takes a deep breath. “You never said which bed so I looked under all of them and I didn’t… I wasn’t, like, _looking_ but I found – ” Bucky makes a helpless gesture with the thing in his hand and Clint can see what it is now and his heart plunges to somewhere below his feet.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky whispers, when he registers what must amount to abject horror painted across Clint’s face. “I didn’t mean to… but I – ”

“Did you read it?” Clint asks, hoarse, even though he can see the answer in every awkward angle of Bucky’s body.

Bucky opens his mouth, closes it again, gives a jerky nod, and then says, “It – everything.” Clint cringes away from his confession. “It’s… Clint. Clint, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read.”

It takes a moment for Clint to register the words, his body coiled so tight his arms ache.

“What?”

Bucky takes an aborted step forward, then stops again.

He’s – he’s not wearing shoes. Bucky’s dressed in pyjamas with no shoes and walked across his fucking yard in bare feet to tell him he’d read the words Clint coughed up through shaking fingers when he was so heartsick he could barely breathe.

“I can feel it, Clint,” Bucky says, soft through the smell of hay. “I can _hear_ it. I had to – ” He takes another step forward, then another. “I had to come straight here and, and tell you because otherwise I’d walk straight to Tasha and demand she – I don’t even know. Pull all the music from my head. Cry with me. Fucking, just… I don’t know. Agree with me.”

Clint doesn’t know what to say, can’t think because he’s still two steps behind, stuck on the little black notebook clutched in Bucky’s hand. So he says the only thing he can think of.

“About what?”

Bucky takes Clint’s hand. Clint hasn’t even realised he was close enough to do so.

“About how fucking stupid we’d been. We nearly lost you ‘cause we were fucking selfish and if that had happened we’d – I’d… it’d be like…”

He trails off again because, like Clint, Bucky is spectacularly bad at expressing himself. They need Natasha, to give shape to their silences. He cradles Clint’s face in his palms, the spine of the notebook digging into the back of Clint’s skull.

“I cannot believe,” Bucky says fiercely, “I nearly lost you through my own fucking idiocy.”

His eyes are bright and ringed in red, like he’s been crying.

“These are the most fucking beautiful songs, Clint.”

“They’re not songs,” Clint mumbles, trying in vain to avoid Bucky’s eyes.

“Poems, feelings, whatever.” Bucky kisses him, hard and fast. “They’re beautiful. They hurt. I want them tattooed on my heart.”

Bucky wraps his arms around Clint’s neck and Clint finally, finally comes unstuck, his arms unclenching to wrap around Bucky’s waist.

“I love you,” Bucky says, his breath damp on the curve of Clint’s shoulder, “so fucking much I could drown in it.”

“Jesus, Buck.”

It’s been eighteen months and apparently they’re not done crying yet.

“I’m sorry I read it,” Bucky says, pulling back, “and if you want me to put it back and never mention it again, I’ll promise I’ll try but I – ” Bucky blows out a heavy breath. He doesn’t need to say he thinks Tasha should know.

Clint had thought about it, about showing Bucky and Tasha. He’d thought about it when he’d suggested they build a recording studio here. He’d thought about it when the surveyors first turned up. He’d thought about it every time he came in to find new instruments in his front room, every time he’d heard Tasha humming under her breath while grooming the horses, every time Bucky sang while washing up. But he’d always dismissed the idea. He isn’t the musician here; he isn’t the one who can bare his soul in poetry and song. He’s a rancher, with calloused hands and a sunburnt nose, an inherited farm and a one eyed dog. He can’t hand out his heart on off-white paper.

But he knows that, even if it’s terrible, Tasha and Bucky would never use his own words to hurt him. It makes him want to be brave enough to try, to trust them with this last thing. So he attempts a nod, but he’s locked up again. His body rejecting the decision his mind has made.

“Please, Clint,” Bucky says, quiet as anything. “I can’t – I can’t keep this from her. It’s – you’re.” Bucky takes a breath. “It’s too beautiful.”

Oh Christ.

Clint wills his muscles to relax enough to force out a nod. He can do this, he _can_. He wants to.

“Okay,” he manages.

 

Tasha's in Lila’s old room. They’d moved his mom’s old piano in there, a shoddy upright whose only redeeming feature is its magical ability to stay in tune, and it’s now the music room, crammed to the brim with what feels like the entire contents of RedStar’s New York recording studio. In four months they’ll be able to move into the recording studio that’s under construction in the west yard, but until then Bucky and Tasha hang out here, buried in guitar strings and endless sheets of paper. Clint has no idea what they’re working on and he doesn’t ask. All he knows is that, so far, Darcy and Wanda have not been involved.

“Tasha,” Bucky touches her shoulder to get her attention and she slips off her headphones with a smile. “I’ve… Here.”

He thrusts Clint’s notebook at her. Tasha’s smile turns bemused.

“What’s…?” She trails off, her gaze flicking from Bucky to Clint, who is unashamedly hiding behind him. “Clint, are you okay?”

Clint nods jerkily, pressing himself further into Bucky’s back. Bucky’s hand tightens around his.

Just because he wants this doesn’t mean he’s not also terrified out of his mind.

“Just… just read it,” Bucky insists and then, much to Clint’s horror, Bucky steps aside so he’s no longer forming a shield between Clint and whatever is about to happen with Tasha and that goddamned notebook. Instead he sits on the spare piano stool and draws Clint towards him until he’s sitting between Bucky’s thighs, Bucky’s arms wrapped around his chest and Bucky’s chin hooked over his shoulder.

“What is it?” Tasha asks, turning the notebook over in her hand.

Clint says nothing, so Bucky replies.

“Please Natasha, just read it.”

She gives them one last lingering look before opening the front cover.

Clint sees her surprise at his own chicken scratch handwriting inside, her eyes widening as she takes in the first few words.

“Clint is this…?” She looks up at him and he knows, without her saying anything more, that she’s asking for permission to continue. He flaps his hand at her, before tucking himself more firmly into Bucky’s embrace.

Tasha reads.

Clint hadn’t realised he’d written so much. Hadn’t realised it could affect someone so much. But watching Tasha read through his notebook is a fascinating form of… he’s not even sure. Not torture exactly, but something like that, maybe. Watching her read his notebook feels like being under a microscope. But it’s also –

Her brow creases sometimes. She mumbles phrases to herself and occasionally gently touches the pages or taps rhythms out on her knee, which she’s pulled up to rest her chin on. Sometimes she looks stricken, sometimes she smiles. Sometimes she sends him fond looks, or worried looks, or looks so sad he feels as though his chest is crumpling, and he always quickly looks away. And all the while Bucky holds him, stroking his thumb over Clint’s hands, kissing his neck and whispering nonsense words of comfort into his hair.

And then, somewhere in the middle, Tasha reads something that forces a pained, sad, hurt sound from between her lips. She presses her hand to her mouth and keeps reading, wiping furiously at her eyes and her nose with the sleeve of her Henley whenever it gets too much. The knee of her leggings becomes damp with tears and snot, her fingers tremble, but she keeps reading, hardly turning to look at Clint or Bucky at all now. And, when she’s done, she closes the notebook gently and stares unseeing at the table in front of her, tears finally falling unchecked down her face.

“I love you,” she says suddenly, turning and fixing Clint with a fierce look. “I love you so fucking much, Clint Barton.”

Somehow it’s so unexpected after everything he’s just seen that Clint completely fails to reply. Not that it matters, because Tasha is out of her seat and clambering into Clint’s lap before he can fully process it.

“I can’t believe we nearly lost you,” she says into his hair as she wraps her arms around him. “I can’t believe we’d be so stupid.”

“That’s what I said,” Bucky says quietly, hugging him tightly from behind.

“I can hear it, Buck,” she breathes.

“I know.” Bucky sounds so awed it makes Clint cling to Tasha all the tighter. “So can I.”

“It’s fucking transcendent.”

And Bucky breathes out a, “Yeah.”

Clint doesn’t really understand what’s happening, but he’s wrapped in Bucky and Tasha and neither of them hate him for the stupid, angry things he wrote in that book. Because they had been angry things, at first. He’d been tipsy and lonely and tired, and he’d open pages at random and scribble down whatever came into his head because it would help make the feelings _go away_ , at least for a while. He’d always been embarrassed come morning, and he’d swear he’d never do it again, but then it’d build up, all these feelings he couldn’t talk to anyone about because who the fuck would understand?

Exactly no one.

No one knew what it felt like to be dating two incredibly famous people. No one knew what it felt like to share the ones they loved with millions of people worldwide, fans who thought they had some kind of claim; who’d talk about them as if they were caricatures, fantasies, not real people at all. He’d had to endure gossip blogs, and twitter hashtags and celebrity magazines speculating about _his partners_ , knowing he could do nothing, not even lay claim to them as his partners. Because doing so would bring those same gossip blogs, and twitter hashtags and celebrity magazines to Iowa, to his _home_ , to dig through his post and interrogate his grocer, and to drag into the light every terrible thing hidden in his family’s past. To drag out Barney and Laura, Lila and Cooper and Nate. Kate and America. Poor Luis.

All that without the absolute shitstorm that would land on all their heads if they admitted that, yes, all three of them are in a relationship together.

No one understood that, not even Bucky and Tasha. So yeah, his words had been angry. And then they had been hurt and sad and wistful and everything in between, until Bucky and Tasha had turned up here eighteen months ago and the pressure was released.

He hasn’t written in it since. Not really.

“I wanna get ‘married to winter and longing for spring’ tattooed on my chest,” Bucky says.

“‘Loudly unsound and tumbling’,” Tasha counters.

“I don’t even know what that means,” Clint mumbles.

“You know what it feels like, though,” she replies.

And yeah, he does.

 

Two weeks later and the notebook hadn’t really been brought up again.

They’d talked about it, that first night, Bucky and Tasha assuaging Clint’s fears that they were angry, or upset, or hurt, and Bucky apologising endlessly for reading it in the first place. Clint couldn’t even work up any ire at that by then – Tasha was angrier about that than him, in fact. _He_ was just relieved; the notebook had ended up sitting on his conscious as if it was the last remaining secret of the mess they were trying to fix, growing in his mind until it had eclipsed everything else, rather than simply being a notebook of feelings he was desperately trying to no longer be embarrassed about.

Plus, Bucky and Tasha were so honestly enthusiastic about it, like Clint had done something amazing. It was mystifying. He’d hoped it wasn’t terrible, but he honestly hadn’t thought it would be anything much more than that.

There was about a week, around when he suggested building the studio in the first place, where Clint had been halfway positive about what he’d written, but that had been crushed again by time and self-doubt and Tasha, who had suddenly sat up at the dinner table one night and gone, “Fuck I’ve got it!” and sung out a whole song to them; explaining that if it went _up_ there and they moved the bridge _there_ and used a minor instead of a major key or whatever, then the entire thing would work. And Bucky’d been so excited, going “Yes, yes, yes,” over and over while demanding she sing it again so he could record it on his phone and… Well, Clint couldn’t do that. He looked after a farm, he didn’t write songs.

As such, when Tasha had asked if she could keep the notebook, he’d shrugged and said yes and figured nothing more would come of it. So Clint is honestly baffled to be sat in his own front room, two weeks later, with both Tasha and Bucky looking nervously at him over two very expensive guitars.

“Okay,” Tasha says, running her hand through her hair. “So we’ve got – we’ve got three songs we’d like to show you.” She looks over at Bucky, who smiles encouragingly. “Two are… yours, I guess.” She looks nervous at that, like Clint would find this anything other than utterly amazing. “So if there’s something you don’t like, or, or anything really, just say.”

Clint flushes, opening and closing his mouth almost immediately because he has no idea what to say. He never, really honestly, dreamt of being a musician, not even after meeting Tasha and Bucky. He’d been in New York to study math and physics. He was the kid who wanted to work for NASA, not the one who wanted to be a rock star.

“The other song,” Bucky continues after a moment, “is ours. For you. It’s… an apology.”

Clint just boggles at that and it’s clear Bucky has no idea how to continue, so Tasha jumps in again.

“We knew we were forgiven when you suggested we build a studio here,” she says and, underneath Clint’s mounting confusion, he can feel relief that he doesn’t have to explain that particular fact. It’s not like he’d know how.

“We know that actions speak louder than words,” Tasha continues, her hands running nervously over the body of her guitar. “We’ve given you a lot of words, but nothing much else so, even though this is still, technically, words,” – Clint can’t help a smile at that – “this is also the action. We’d hire concert orchestras for this. For you. Play it at Glastonbury. Beam it into space. Anything you want, so you know, so you _really_ know. Okay?”

Clint laughs, a wet sound, his heart so full of love he thinks he’s close to floating away. God, but Tasha and Bucky can be dumb. They’ve put their massive career on hold for him and he absolutely knows what that means. If that’s not a grand fucking gesture, he’s not sure what is.

“I thought we were done with this shit,” he says instead of pointing that out. It would just descend into a pointless argument about who’s allowed what kind of grand gestures.

“What shit?” Bucky asks.

“Feelings.”

Tasha gives him a small smile. “Not yet, Barton.” She places her hands on her guitar again; fingers on the frets, pick hovering over the strings. “This one we called 154 Acres, ‘cause that’s what you’d written on the top of that page. But you can call it whatever you want.”

“Oh, and Clint?” Bucky’s voice, firmer and more serious than expected, stalls Tasha’s hands on her guitar. “With your permission, with your _help_ , we’d like to turn this into something.”

“A critically acclaimed album?” Clint laughs slightly. The thought makes his stomach lurch, but this time it’s not entirely unpleasant.

“If you want. Whatever you want.”

Clint looks from one to the other, at the love and trust and hope and understanding in their eyes. They’d let this go, if he asked them to, he knows they would; the demos would be left to lie dusty in a box somewhere for the rest of time if Clint decided he didn’t like the idea. That’s why he nods, in the end. They’re offering this knowing he might say no. The least he can do is really consider it.

Plus, the twin smiles he gets in return are beautiful.

“Okay,” Tasha says, placing her fingers back on the frets. “We’ve got 154 Acres, then a song we’ve called Braveheart, which is definitely up for negotiation as a title, and then a song called Midnight, Ohio.”

She nods over at Bucky, who counts them in with a tapping foot, and then Clint is picked up, transported somewhere far away, the music so beautiful he would doubt he’d had anything to do with if at all if he didn’t occasionally recognise a phrase as one he’d written months ago.

It’s incredible, it’s cathartic. It’s –

Fucking transcendent.

**Cerys Matthews on BBC Radio 6 Music**

“That was 154 Acres, the debut single by Helios, made up of Natasha Romanov and James Barnes of RedStar, and their mystery friend. Absolutely beautiful, don’t you agree? Steve in Birmingham certainly does. ‘What is this eargasm?’ he’s tweeted us. [laughter] Eargasm. Never heard that one before. ‘I’m just sat at home crying on a Sunday morning,’ says Claire in Aberdeen. ‘Absolutely phenomenal stuff. Helios, you’ve got yourself at least one guaranteed album sale.’ Two, Claire. I’ll definitely be buying a copy. And here, through our Facebook page: ‘Cerys, please assure me that I have not, in fact, died and gone to heaven,’ says Sam from Washington DC – well Sam, good morning and I certainly hope not. He goes on to say, ‘I don’t think I’ve had such a visceral reaction to a piece of music since the first time I heard my dad play Space Oddity.’ High praise indeed! In fact, many people have got in touch with similar sentiments; Peter in Denver – lots of people from the States this morning – Peter in Denver has a similar story, as does Helen from Doncaster and Dafydd from my home-town of Swansea. Hello Dafydd! Well, I’m glad you all enjoyed that as much as I did, listeners. 154 Acres by Helios and it’s out this Monday on Little Barn Records. And now, Nina Cried Power by Hozier.”

**Author's Note:**

> [Nina Cried Power by Hozier.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2YgDua2gpk) (I am obsessed.)
> 
> Cerys Matthews does indeed have a Sunday Morning Voice. You should check her out on BBC Radio 6 Music, Sunday mornings, 10 'til 1 (UK time).
> 
>  **ETA Oct 2018:** I now made an album cover, with a tracklisting and singles covers, for the album Pairies Skies by Helios. It can be found [here](http://cloud--atlas.tumblr.com/post/179215244001/album-and-singles-covers-for-prairie-skies-by) on my tumblr.


End file.
